"A detention facility is a unique place fraught with serious security dangers. Smuggling of money, drugs, weapons, and other contraband is all too common an occurrence." Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 559 (1979)....  The presence of such contraband threatens the health and safety of inmates, corrections officers, and jail employees. The record contains reports of the death of an inmate housed in the general population from drugs obtained within the prison, and of one detainee who set her clothes on fire with a lighter smuggled into the cell, of another who mutilated himself with staples similarly secreted into the jail, and of a third who attempted suicide with razor-blades smuggled into the jail in his rectal cavity. The jail administrators have concluded that, based on their experience, "the greatest opportunity for the introduction of drugs and weapons into the jail occurs at the point when an arrestee is received into the jail for booking and, thereafter, housing." In light of this conclusion, Sheriff Hennessey developed and implemented a "Booking Searches" policy. This policy authorized officers to strip search an arrestee when any one of eleven conditions applied, including the condition at issue here, namely, when "[a] person [was] assigned a custody level by Classification and scheduled for custodial housing."

Plaintiffs' facial challenge to the Booking Searches policy is the only issue before us in this interlocutory appeal. This is an important point, because the dissent draws upon unproven allegations to give a shocking and inflammatory account of mistreatment by jail officials, including forcible strip searches conducted in an abusive and violent manner. The dissent's sensationalist account of individual factual allegations is worse than irrelevant, as it invites us to decide this case on the basis of disputed factual issues not yet presented by the parties, not yet considered by the district court, and not yet weighed by a jury. San Francisco has vigorously denied the allegations the dissent recites. Nevertheless, if true, these allegations are quite serious, even absent the dissent's embellishments.  Such abuses would contravene San Francisco's written policy, which required that searches be conducted in a "professional manner," and prohibited officers of the opposite sex to be present. If these allegations were found to be true, the victims of those abuses would have strong claims against San Francisco.

But the plaintiffs are not making such claims. Plaintiffs emphasized throughout their briefing that they "brought this action to challenge the blanket policy and practice of searching prearraignment arrestees . . . ," not the individual cases. Thus, plaintiffs relied "almost exclusively on defendants' depositions and written policies as the basis of the material facts" in order to avoid disputed issues of fact that would defeat summary judgment.

For purposes of this narrow appeal, we are called upon to assess the constitutionality of the policy itself, not violations of that policy; thus, as did the district court, we must assume the challenged policy was followed scrupulously. Although the dissent's dramatic accounts stir  the emotions, they are misleading and ultimately irrelevant to the case before us. Not a single one of the long parade of victims described by the dissent--Mary Bull, Charli Johnson, Bernie  Galvin, Michael Marron, Laura Timbrook, Salome Mangosing, Leigh Fleming, Michelle De Ranleau, or Deborah Flick --have claims at issue in this appeal. Rather than highlight the dramatic individual anecdotes that can be mined from the record, we limit our discussion to the issue actually before us: plaintiffs' challenge to the jail's written strip-search policy. We leave other, factual questions to be addressed by the district court in the first instance.